Juan Bautista Canut de Bon Gil

Juan Bautista Canut de Bon Gil (30 September 1846-9 November 1896) was a Spanish Methodist preacher who founded several evangelical churches in Chile during the late 19th century. Today, the term canuto is used as a derogatory term for evangelicals in Chilean slang.

Biography
Juan Bautista Canut de Bon Gil was born in Valencia, Spain in 1846, and he joined the Jesuits in Balaguer, Lerida at the age of 18. Two years later, he was placed in charge of a tailoring workshop at the Jesuit college of Tortosa. During the period of anti-clericalism caused by the Carlist uprisings, he was sent to Argentina and then to Chile. In 1871, he retired from the Jesuits because he wanted to study rather than preach, and he settled in Los Andes, Chile in 1872. He sold fabrics until 1876, when he found a copy of the New Testament from the Bible Society of Valparaiso at a railway station, and he claimed that this was the first encounter that he had with the Gospel. In 1880, he became the first Spanish-speaking preacher in Chile after befriending an English-speaking Presbyterian minister, but he did not stop hesitating to leave the Catholic faith until 1888, when he met an American Methodist pastor and became a Methodist preacher. Canut became a Methodist bishop in 1890, and he was known for his great and fiery religious oratory, becoming a full-time preacher. As he was wary of the Catholic Church's powerful influence in northern Chile, he decided to head to southern Chile, where he preached to peasants and to inhabitants of distant cities, founding churches in Coquimbo, La Serena, Concepción, Traiguén, Angol, Los Angeles, Victoria, and Temuco. In 1896, he moved to Santiago for health reasons, and he died there on 9 November. His evangelical followers were derogatorily nicknamed "Canutos", and the term now refers to all Protestants and highly-religious people in Chile in a derogatory manner.